Free Five Stories for the Dark Months by Katherine Traylor Page B

Contents
     
    The Blue Child’s great audience
chamber was a cavern underneath the ground. Its walls and floor and
ceiling were all thick with ice, and at the back an enormous hole
opened into darkness: the door to the underworld, whence the Blue
Child and his family had come.
    Bleak as it was, the hall was
stuffed with courtiers, who watched the human petitioners go by as
if this were a holiday.
    Perhaps it was a holiday, for them.
Magda really didn’t know what they did, for they were never seen up
on the ground.
    Most of courtiers here were
Iubar—the Shining Ones—half corpse and half angel, with gemstone
eyes and odd, mechanical expressions. They were said to fly the
heavens at night, too high and dark for human eyes to see, and
bring the Blue Child news: the doings of his family, his enemies,
and his wretched human subjects.
    Some of the courtiers, though, were
humans themselves—scattered through the crowd like bone fragments
in a sugar bowl, perfumed and powdered to hide the odor of their
living bodies. They were finely dressed, some more sumptuously than
the Iubar, but their faces were pinched and watchful. They looked
like starving wolves, afraid they’d be devoured if they let their
attention stray for a second.
    The Blue Child sat on a throne of
ice in the center of the hall. He wore a short silk tunic, sandals,
and a gold ring around his arm that looked like grave goods. Though
his fine youthful body was tinged a hypothermic blue, he didn’t
shiver, and lounged indolently across his icy throne as if
perfectly comfortable.
    He smiled condescendingly as Magda
knelt before the throne. “Well, then, woman—have you a petition?”
His sweet, treble voice rang like struck crystal.
    Magda bowed. “Yes, my
lord.”
    “Then pray, speak—but speak
quickly, for Petitioners’ Day is nearly over.”
    Several of the courtiers tittered.
Magda gritted her teeth, concealing her anger, and
began.
    “My lord, on the day when the ice
melted, and the door to your mother’s kingdom was uncovered... just
before you, and all your brothers and sisters, stepped out into the
sunlight and raised your perfect faces to the sky—before the Winter
of Winters had begun...” She swallowed, finding that her throat was
full of tears. “In those days, I was newly married, and expecting
my first child.”
    When she looked up, the Blue Child
had leaned forward, setting his elegant face on the knuckles of one
thin hand. One could almost imagine that he found her story...
diverting—but Magda had been watching him, and knew that he used
the same face with every petitioner.
    “On the last day, sir, the baby
was three months along, and I was walking with my husband at the
seawall. We were... happy...”
    “Ah, happiness .” He made a
vaguely derisive gesture, and his courtiers tittered. “So sweet; so
fragile. Continue.”
    “When the skies turned black,”
Magda said, “and the great shriek rent the air... when the
lightning flashed, and the oceans died, and the whales floated up
from the depths to lie on the sea like bladder-wrack...” Her mouth
kept speaking, but in her mind’s eye she saw it all again—birds
falling from the sky, crops withered in the field, and Peter...
“When the ninety-nine were killed, and the hundredth left to
mourn... I lost my husband, and the baby, at the same
time.”
    She remembered how Peter’s face had
looked in the moment before the seizures—how he’d reached for her,
and tried to touch her cheek, before he’d lost control of his
muscles and flopped on the ground like a suffocating fish. Even
then, before he’d died, his groans had sounded like the bellow of a
thrall—and as she’d taken his hand, the pain had
begun...
    “The pregnancy could not survive.”
Her own voice sounded oddly clinical, as if she were listing off a
litany of griefs that had afflicted a total stranger. “I
miscarried. There was no one to help—we were far from the
village—and I had to...” She paused,